MOL doubles down on climate goals with CDR credit milestone

Japanese shipping major Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL) has passed another milestone on its decarbonization journey, having become the ‘first’ in the country’s maritime industry to retire technology-based carbon removal credits (CDR).

Three years have passed since the launch of the NextGen CDR facility, a joint initiative between MOL, Boston Consulting Group, the Liechtenstein-based private banking and asset management group LGT, reinsurance company Swiss Re, and Switzerland-based investment banking company UBS focused on supporting the development of a market for credible, scalable carbon removal technologies.

According to MOL, the company has now officially obtained 2,000 tons of technology-based CDR credits through the NextGen facility from a biochar project led by Bolivia’s Exomad Green, which specializes in the production of this biomass-derived charcoal product.

In doing so, MOL has reportedly become the first maritime industry player in Japan to mark this credit retirement. The company sees it as a ‘big’ step in helping the shipping sector move beyond just emission reduction to actual carbon removal.

MOL anticipates that the demand for technology-based CDR credits, designed to remove and store carbon dioxide over extended periods of time, will continue on its upward trajectory. Still, it was noted that the credits remain in the early stages of development, both in terms of cost and technology, with only a handful of stakeholders able to purchase them right now and take them out of circulation.

Even though CDR credits do not directly offset greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within a company’s value chain, the Tokyo-based maritime transportation heavyweight believes that this path will ‘almost certainly’ play a role in removing CO2 emissions at a bigger scale (Beyond Value Chain Mitigation).

As informed, the efforts are also projected to help MOL accomplish its own milestone of contributing to the removal of a cumulative 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide by 2030 under the MOL Group Environmental Vision 2.2, implemented to act as a roadmap to net zero by 2050.

The company’s representatives have also shared that through ‘milestones’ like these, the aim is to “further ensure that we will be able to neutralize our remaining emissions in the future, as well as to promote the spread and expansion of negative emissions in order to achieve decarbonization throughout society.”

While nature-based CDR solutions entail practices like afforestation, reforestation, and soil carbon management, the technological end of the story sees the application of methods such as direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) and BECCS, which integrates biomass power generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS). DACCS and BECCS have so far held a ‘prominent’ role, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines has said.

To remind, in December last year, two other maritime transportation players from Japan set their sights on carbon credit purchase via DACCS.

Namely, at the end of that month, Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK) and energy titan ENEOS penned an agreement to buy CDR credits produced through the DACCS process. The credits would be bought from U.S.-based carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) company 1PointFive’s STRATOS direct air capture plant in Texas.